35/100
Gonna struggle to tackle this one with any depth, or even breadth. Here's the gist: I enjoy watching Jackie Chan kick ass and risk bodily harm performing insanely acrobatic feats, but I decidedly do not enjoy watching him yuk it up. Police Story 1–3 and Drunken Master II (the only Chan vehicles made in Hong Kong that I've seen to date) entertain me despite their comedic aspects, and I sorta dug Shanghai Noon exclusively thanks to Owen Wilson, dismissing Chan's half of the pairing with a dismissive parenthetical reference to his "endless mugging." Put him opposite Chris Tucker and I'm in pain for the duration. He's just not funny to me...and if you've seen City Hunter, the problem should be clear. I suppose technically this adaptation of a manga I'm unfamiliar with (which appears to have also spawned a zillion animated films and TV shows, all of which I had to wade through en route to finding the version of City Hunter on Tubi that's subtitled rather than badly dubbed) qualifies as action-comedy, but its ratio of action to comedy approaches 1:8 by my rough estimation. That briefly seemed like maybe it might be okay—the movie opens with a mildly amusing bit in which Chan's hero, who's called Ryo Saeba in the subtitles but something that sounds like Man Bo in the dialogue (which was never not confusing), introduces us to his sidekick while falsely claiming to be both better-looking and taller than he is. And there are a few meta-touches, like Ryo/Man fighting bad guys in a theater showing a Bruce Lee movie and copying Bruce's moves, that flirt with being clever. But the extremely broad sense of humor that Chan generally favors does nothing for me. One running gag involves a minor female character who keeps losing her balance and toppling over because her breasts are so large, and I not only repeatedly failed to laugh at it but devoted significant mental energy to wondering whether the joke was supposed to be that she'd overdone it with a boob job or whether she's just naturally large-bosomed. Safe to say that when you've started analyzing the humor in an effort to determine why it's falling flat (unlike Chesty McGee!), it's pretty much over.
Were City Hunter jam-packed with eye-popping agility and spectacular stunts, I could to some degree overlook the ostensibly hilarious stuff that left me stone-faced. But part of the film's comic conceit (ditched toward the end, thankfully but with no reason or explanation) is that Ryo/Man, while a celebrated private investigator, is also a hapless coward possessing no special skills whatsoever. More of a Clouseau-type figure, almost. There's a skateboard chase sequence toward the beginning that does feature stunts, but they're clearly created via editing, not demonstrations of Chan's actual prowess. Chan's first genuinely physically impressive actions occur just over an hour into the movie. Prior to that, he's mostly flailing, and not in the virtuosic way that the great silent comedians (and perhaps Chan himself, in other movies) sometimes flail, where the character's meant to be out of control but we can see how much athleticism that entails. The focus is much more on...well, mugging. Wacky faces. Drag, at one point. Standard '90s homophobia, with an AIDS joke thrown in just for the hell of it. Also, and I found this deeply weird, the movie's plot is basically Die Hard on a Yacht—thieves posing as terrorists—which means that we see a bunch of innocent people brutally murdered, not unlike the scene in which Hans Gruber kills Mr. Takagi when Takagi refuses to give up the code. To my mind, that clashes a bit with the prevailing super-goofy tone. Wong Jing has directed well over 100 films but the only one I'd previously seen is The New Legend of Shaolin (which Letterboxd calls Legend of the Red Dragon), and that was way back in 1995 so I have no memory of it whatsoever, couldn't say whether City Hunter is typical or anomalous. Though the fact that it's ranked as his most popular film out of 123 suggests that I'm probably on a small island of dissenters. As for Chan, I'm up for further exploration (having seen only four of his Hong Kong classics is embarrassing), but preferably with more kineticism and less cutting up.